


Reminiscent

by Augustus



Category: Backstreet Boys, Popslash
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-08-10
Updated: 2002-08-10
Packaged: 2018-03-09 14:01:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3252440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Augustus/pseuds/Augustus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Howie's feelings on his break-up with AJ. His POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reminiscent

**Author's Note:**

> Chronology: Black and Blue

Sometimes, when we speak, I feel the reminiscence solidify between us, a shimmering mass of before that stretches stout distance from his fingertips to my mind. Each intonation resonates with the past; each gesture drips memories onto the shadow-strewn ground. I feel my words echo in the fog of contemplation as he draws clichés in the sky and strangles my heartbeat with inconsequential lines.

Sometimes, when he leaves, I watch his steps with divided eyes. There's a lilt to the swing of knowing hips and his shoulders rise beneath the acknowledgement of my gaze. His neck glows white beneath the spontaneity of the sun and I remember the feel of twitching sinews as I marked flesh with teeth and pressed jagged breaths against the broken temerity of his jaw. He never looks back; his feet clatter an audacious rhythm, assured of my immobility.

Sometimes, when I watch him, his tone leaps and flutters, words flirting with insensibility before the staring lethargy of my audience. Eyes bow to me, dark murmurs of my imagination, and he dresses his syllables with bravado. He speaks of others and scatters his curls with tense and rigid fingers, pulling knots into bland submission as he peers at me through sidelong eyes. I fade and splinter and cast broad echoes of perceived truths into the crinkles of my happiness. He whispers behind the curve of a twisted hand and I blink my inattention to the stoic beige-hewn wall.

Sometimes, when I am alone, I twine his image into perfection, splice reality with desire and carve a paragon from insignificance. I trace photographs with fingertips, caught within a prosaic reflection of emotions portrayed. I hate and I love him, stretch prone against scent-stripped sheets, tickling my palms alone their icy frigidity. I clutch the vapour of his echoes, cover his absence with crude delineation as a faded declaration of his love turns and withers in my mind. I store ourselves in closed drawers and fold yesterday into fierce opacity.

Sometimes, when I think of him, my thoughts mist and shatter, love ceding to hatred and sliding tension through my limbs. I picture him broken, flawed, bent beneath the furore of my indignation. In crimson moments, I vanquish his residuum, tight with black intensity and aching from the bone. I hope and repent, breath caught within my antipathy, as I render my obsession with a dichotomy of thought.

Sometimes, when we meet, we tangle in obscurity, frozen in a history that smothers each glancing touch. Time blanches the immediacy as a tentative restoration skims threads of possibility across the immutability of our divide. His smile begins to warm rather than propel cold loss throughout my lungs and I replace sepia regression with the shade of something new. He nods his blessing as I fall towards his antithesis. Blonde permeates my consciousness as I shy from a transformation that can only mean an end. Reminiscence tatters and wanes as I move forward into infinity and an embrace that dims and soothes.

**10th August 2002**


End file.
